The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  It is impossible to get rid of such dictators if they are ruthless enough, and so it was with Duvalier. He forestalled palace coups by exiling his son-in-law as ambassador to Paris and, over the radio, organizing the execution of his best friends. He himself died in his bed, after a long and painful illness, on 22 April 1971. His illness was a secret, though everyone knew; on the morning of the death, there was a strange calm in the town, as even the dogs somehow did not bark, or the cocks crow, as they generally and cacophonously did. It was a palpable grande peur, as in the start of any revolution. It was clear that the old brute had finally died when, on the radio, they played their classical record, of all oddities the K464 Mozart string quartet which had been Beethoven’s favourite. This only happened at times of national emergency, such as a hurricane or an invasion scare. The record had a crack in it, so that the same phrase was repeated again and again, though no-one noticed. Then, hour after hour, those Duvalier speeches were replayed, meandering through all the platitudes of twentieth-century megalomania: ‘je, je, je, moi, moi, moi’, ‘des anarchisses’, ‘le pèple’, ‘la politik que préconize mon gouvernèmon’, ‘contre les mersses demokratik’ etc. The Americans and the usual smooth mulatto middle-men managed, to everyone’s surprise, to organize a transition of power to Duvalier’s teenage son, Jean-Claude.

  Duvalier’s funeral had a mass turnout. He lay in state in the presidential palace for rather too long, given the heat and the power cuts, and was then escorted to a vast mausoleum. There were some alarms in the crowd as it shuffled through the dust and the ruts. An aircraft hopping between Nassau and Kingston was thought to be bringing vengeful exiles; the wooden balconies, overloaded with spectators, sometimes let out pistol-like cracks; and a little gust of wind, a miniature tornado, suddenly swept the street rubbish into a column. In voodoo superstition, this means that a soul is entering hell, and it momentarily disconcerted the shuffling, blue-denimed or evening-coated procession. Life then got back to genial normality for a while. ‘Baby Doc’ liked parties with his young mulatto friends. He was first run by his mother, known as ‘La Cornélie du siècle’ from her overweight Gracchus, and then by his wife, who took her friends on shopping expeditions to Paris by private plane while the going was good. Hope there was, that light industry — sewing baseballs — and the use of Creole for elementary instruction by missionaries would help the country to progress. Instead, the rule was ampil pitit: a plague of children, swamping the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. These were the dragons’ teeth of la partie française de l’île de Saint-Domingue , and many sensible people might well look across from Môle Saint-Nicolas in the north-west, from where, at night, you could dimly make out the flickering lights of Cuba, across the narrow gulf.

  There had been another revolution on Cuba, and it was set to have a vast effect on Latin and Central America because it stood for liberation from the American imperialism shown in those lights. The island had been taken from its Spanish masters by the Americans in 1898 and though it was independent that independence was limited, in that there was a permanent American base at Guantanamo, and the economy was more or less captured by the USA. It did make much progress: Cuba was the most developed of countries south of the USA in terms of literacy, medicine, etc. But there was something of a revolutionary tradition and for a good reason, much of the island having nothing else to think about. It was in one sense condemned to a semi-colonial status because of its chief and even only crop, sugar. Cuba was the largest producer in the hemisphere, and it was the Americans who bought it up, by a fixed arrangement which helped when world prices were low and and not when they were high. Sugar occupied half a million acres, and there were huge factories for grinding; transport took much labour. The revolts of the past had been for rent reductions, and there had also been revolts against the cattle-breeders or tobacco-growers: the landowners generally feared another Saint-Domingue, but anti-imperialism was a powerful enough cause, and had produced its local hero, José Marti, who had denounced the Americans. Their initial occupation had been contemptuous.

  The GDP per capita figure was not too bad, but there was an enormous income gap. Sugar had the disadvantage that the cultivation and harvesting of it took six or seven months, and sometimes just four, after which the workers had nothing to do, especially given the heat of the climate, and if they did not develop a habit of saving, then they would be in debt for much of the year and would have trouble repaying out of the next year’s proceeds: a classic debt-spiral known throughout the peasant world (the real meaning of the word kulak is not ‘rich farmer’ but ‘usurer’). This was complicated again by the existence of a black minority, descended from the slaves that Spain had kept going even after the French had freed them (in 1848). The sugar-owners lived well, and Havana was a famous capital, with noble Spanish colonial architecture. It attracted literate Americans. But it also attracted gangsters, who took over the gambling and the prostitution: Havana became a place where the repressed Americans of that era could escape from the world of the Eisenhowers. Cuban politics was dominated by these interests, and there was much nationalist resentment of this. In 1933, an army sergeant of mixed blood, Fulgencio Batista, with Communist associates, led off with a campaign against the rich, then retired in 1944, but returned after a coup in 1952, this time just greedy; gambling franchises were given out freely, and required contributions towards Batista’s own funds; he became very rich. Meyer and Jack Lansky, as Mafia capos, became notorious. On the other side peasants in shanty towns might be evicted for small debts owed to grocers. Meanwhile a university did go up, and middle-class children often became disaffected in it, as they watched Havana obey the Americans. There was a strong enough current of discontent in Havana, much of it among students.

  One such was Fidel Castro, illegitimate son (by his father’s cook) of a prosperous (and grasping) farmer who had emigrated from Galicia, the Scotland of Spain. He went to a religious school and like other revolutionaries of the Latin world — including France — seems to have taken an anti-clerical line early on because he was badly treated (in his case by Jesuits). His fellow students (in the law faculty) looked down on him because he was a flashy upstart. At this stage he was not a Communist and even had Mussolini’s Works in a dozen volumes on his bookshelves (for a time Mussolini himself had counted as a left-wing figure and had had good relations with the USSR), but in any case the Communist Party itself said that Batista should be supported. In 1953 (26 July) Castro and a few companions tried to seize the Moncada army barracks in Santiago, the rival city of Havana, the atmosphere of which Castro did not like. As with other such pre-revolutionary gambits — Hitler’s Putsch in the Munich beer-hall, or Louis Napoleon’s landing at Boulogne in 1840, when, unable to find an eagle as a symbol, his little group, before being rounded up by the police, made do with a parrot bought at a chandler’s in Southampton — Castro’s affair was near farce, but it gave him another essential revolutionary credential, prison (1953-5). That might have been the end of that, but Batista’s ways were such that opposition built up, from army officers, students, trade unions and even the Church in Santiago; the Americans themselves were uncomfortable, and pushed for improvements. Castro was released under an amnesty; a banker gave him support, and so did an exiled politician. He then escaped to Mexico and Guatemala, where the Americans had overthrown a left-wing movement (led by Colonel Jacobo Arbenz) in 1954 (‘a Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere’, Eisenhower had said, though rumour had it that keeping the low wages paid to the local Indian banana-cutters also counted for something). There, by chance, he met a young Argentinian rebel medical student, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara — a one-time sickly youth with a very pious mother who gobbled up stacks of literature. He was trying to make a living as an itinerant photographer. Anti-Americanism and then Marxist ideas were their medium, and the two young men went on to Mexico, where there was a real Left; Castro talked, and talked; he came to dominate a small group of Cubans.

  The two gathered some eighty associate
s, planned a revolution and with $20,000 set off for Cuba in the Granma, a vessel meant for twelve. It landed in December 1956, got some immediate help from a cattle thief and set up in the Sierra Madre, on the south-eastern coast. The invasion began badly. The pilot had fallen into the sea, and most of the men were rounded up; the peasant rising did not occur, and on the contrary the locals were hostile. Castro moved on to a poor region, Oriente province, the poorest in Cuba (with a black population: the black Juan Almeida became a token figure later on) and attacked this or that demoralized, badly paid government post — not a threat taken very seriously to begin with but requiring in the end some response. Batista was clumsy. He had the police beat up people who sang the national anthem after Mass, and the like. It was again part of a pattern that the old order — if that is the right name for Batista’s regime — would make stupid mistakes of this sort, and present the revolutionaries with gifts. Castro was a good enough student of such things, and knew how a guerrilla movement could insert itself into local peasant affairs (as Mao had done) whereas Batista’s men were generally ineptly led conscripts.

  When finally Batista’s men did make an effort, they moved up a river valley without securing the ridges on either side and were surrounded, Castro taking much weaponry from them but also releasing the 263 prisoners as a goodwill gesture. In the meantime he had attracted American attention, in June 1958 taking hostage some twenty-four sailors on leave from Guantanamo. He held on to them to deter Batista from using American rocketry. The trick worked: Batista grounded his air force. But there was another important element. Many Americans had a guilty conscience, and a sympathetic journalist, Herbert Matthews, had arrived early in 1957 to live with this new charismatic rebel: he put Castro on the map, himself striking poses of a kind used by Hollywood later on to portray the journalist-as-hero. Senator Mansfield, a warhorse in the making, spoke for an arms embargo against Batista, and, as had happened with the Kuomintang, there was now pressure for human rights, which made for trouble in Havana in 1957. Here, Castro was cunning. He did not want successful rivals, and therefore withheld help from the anti-Batista strikers and the Havana underground; it was not he but the Americans who, on 10 December 1958, told Batista that he should go. There was a final New Year party, and Batista used it as a blind: he got away (to Santo Domingo) beforehand, and early that morning, the Batista women in their finery had to escape by plane to Miami. The chief judge of the Supreme Court, Manuel Urrutia, agreed to take over as temporary president and a general strike in Havana ensured Castro’s arrival in the city. It was a joyeuse entrée of a new ruler, and he began quite well: there was not even much out-of-hand killing of the Batista men.

  But this moment did not last for long. Very early in 1959, Castro at once took over from the Havana people, and Urrutia escaped, disguised as a milkman. Castro was not just aiming to succeed Batista and proclaim yet another exercise in radicalism. There was to be a social and by implication an anti-American revolution. The first steps involved rent reductions, wage increases and on 1 May 1959 the establishment of a militia. American property was taken over, and there were fights with Esso and Shell. But Castro was popular enough on the Left, and that included much of the American Left, which saw in him only a sort of Jacksonian democrat. Beards ruled (as they had done ever since the 1830s, as a badge of the Left: thus Marx). Writers and artists popular-fronted themselves in the thirties Comintern manner: Juan Goytisolo appeared; Picasso applauded; Le Corbusier offered to design a proper prison provided Picasso’s murals were not used; a well-known French agronomist, René Dumont, offered his services but was expelled for criticizing Castro’s plans for huge collectives to grow pineapples that could not compete with those of Abidjan. Pablo Neruda appeared but, out of jealousy, the local poet, Nicolás Guillén, tried to sabotage the visit. Castro had read some books, and he did impress men such as Graham Greene, who had lived for a time in Haiti and recognized the problems involved in the Caribbean. At this stage Communists were only tangentially involved: only one, Carlos Rodríguez, had joined Castro, at the last minute, in the Sierra, and even he had been a Batista minister. However, Castro made international waves as the fight against American interests grew, and in February 1960 Mikoyan appeared. He warned against precipitate action, but got the measure of Castro’s vanity: he ‘can’t stand not being front-page news’.

  Radicalism proceeded apace. The trade unions were taken over, and a land reform was proclaimed (maximum holding: 67 acres). Castro refused to hold elections, and his brother Raúl appeared as a Saint-Just figure, shrilly and self-righteously denouncing opposition: it grew, even among the peasants, but was divided and in any case there was an expectation that the Americans would come to the rescue. They were certainly provoked, as their business interests were taken over, and as Castro refused, for weeks, even to see the ambassador (he himself ran affairs chaotically, from a hotel floor, and addressed million-strong crowds with hours-long speeches). Eisenhower was bewildered: he meant well enough and so did Christian Herter, the new head of the State Department, but early in 1960, with cattle ranches being invaded, there were television rantings by Castro as to the expropriation of property: American companies, including General Electric and Remington Rand, had $200m at stake in October 1960. Trials in public started, in the sports centre, with public executions, and Castro vastly resented the criticism. By May 1960 there were huge anti-American rallies, but there was also a small flood of refugees, at 2,000 per day on occasion. The free press was now closed down, the printers refusing to print it (‘anti-democratic’) and in July the US Congress voted to let the President reduce Castro’s sugar quota. Castro responded by expropriating all foreign property, and there were demonstrative foreign displays, as in the Organization of American States and in New York, when Castro visited the United Nations, stayed in a Harlem hotel, and met Khrushchev.

  Either Castro gave way, or he went on. He went on. A single Marxist-Leninist Party was set up, in 1961, with the usual paraphernalia, including revolutionary fancy dress and a theoretical journal, Cuba Socialista, edited by an old Comintern hand. Castro made a show of associating himself with the ‘non-aligned’ leaders, including the Algerian Ahmed Ben Bella (who came on a visit in September 1962), Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia and the inevitable Tito. The USSR took a serious hand, and agreed to buy (at half the price) the sugar that the Americans were not taking, lent $900m (by 1964) and educated 4,000 Cubans. It was now that Castro, abroad, generally appeared in his guerrilla rig-out, no doubt an example for Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization later on, and that the CIA, with Richard Bissell and under Allen Dulles, began to plot Castro’s overthrow.

  Relations were broken off, and a plot to use Cuban counter-revolutionaries went ahead. By now there was a new President, John F. Kennedy, and he allowed the plan to proceed. Preparations went ahead for a landing at the Bay of Pigs; but in Guatemala, where a hundred different Cuban exile groups were represented, there was an atmosphere of black farce: a brothel was built for them, while the American trainers, arrogant and speaking no Spanish, lived apart and better, and their commander, a colonel, simply said, ‘I just don’t trust any goddam Cuban.’ The counter-revolution turned into a huge version of the U2 fiasco. Of course, it needed some preparation from the air, but that was kept very limited, as Kennedy did not want to expose his involvement too far and anyway feared criticism from Castro’s friends in New York. Two planes attacked each of the airfields — warning of something coming, but not enough to affect the issue and, despite precautions of a clumsy sort, very obviously not the work of exiled Cubans. The landing at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April was music hall floundering. It occurred on a reef coast, which damaged the ships, and the deep water swamped the invaders’ mobile radios (‘walkie-talkies’). The coast was not, as expected, deserted: on the contrary there were charcoal burners at work, and they spread news of the landings. Almost at once the exile force — 1,500 men — was pinned own. Kennedy would not use air power to help;
1,200 men were taken prisoner (they were bought out, late in 1962). Here was another opening for Khrushchev: he would now pose as the protector of the People’s Cuba.

  Cuba made for legend: Che Guevara agonizing on student T-shirts and posters the Western world over. But those T-shirts could as well have had a thermonuclear cloud instead, because the collision of the USA and the USSR over this and other ‘Third World’ matters did for a time threaten the ultimate disaster. Cuba now provoked this. Castro was full of himself, and so was Khrushchev: they had stood up to the Americans and their proxies, and in the United States Castro had many sympathizers who even blamed America for his turn to Communism: he had been, they said, just a sort of Jacksonian democrat, and it was only the vicious and interest-bound hatred in Washington that threw him into alliance with the Soviet Union. The truth was of course more complicated. The Soviet machine was used to dealing with such matters as national liberation fronts, had managed their precursors in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, and had handled European resistance movements. Raúl Castro and Guevara himself had been members of the Party and in April 1959, weeks after the capture of Havana, they sought Soviet military help: it came, through Czechoslovakian weaponry, and with mediation by the KGB, the resident of which in Havana subsequently became Soviet ambassador (in general, the affair was handled not by the Soviet foreign ministry but by the KGB and the Central Committee’s International Department). By March 1960 Castro himself was approaching Moscow, suspecting that the Americans would intervene. Khrushchev spoke out against American intervention early in July, described the Cuban revolution as ‘national-democratic’ (i.e. a step towards socialism, according to his own understanding of Lenin) and in January 1961 made a famous speech in which he offered Soviet protection for movements of national liberation, such as Castro’s. The speech came before Kennedy’s own Inaugural, which offered help to any nation saving itself from Communist takeover (an echo of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ of 1947). Then came the Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, which threw Cuba and the USSR together, and Castro, with KGB help, ruthlessly suppressed opposition.